I don't buy it. What is Mr. Blair doing is an equivalent of screaming "FIRE" in a theater, and then "exposing" those stupid enough to run even if there is no fire.
It reminds me of two Czech cinematographers who made a "documentary" - Cesky sen - where the premise was that they made fake advertising for a new fake supermarket chain with things like large TVs for 5$ and so on, and then they "exposed the consumerism" of people "stupid enough to believe it" to come in droves for the mock opening.
I find this type of moralizing elitist and wrong. Garbage in, garbage out is true for humans too. If you deliberately feed people misinformation, then you have no right to complain (or feel morally superior) about bad decisions they make.
He writes stuff that is so over the top that it's obvious satire. Like The Onion article about Congress demanding a retracting stadium style roof. If you fall for an Onion article, you have noone to blame but your own gullibility and ignorance.
"DISCLAIMER: America’s Last Line of Defense is a satirical publication that uses the imagination of liberals to expose the extreme bigotry and hate and subsequent blind gullibility that festers in right-wing nutjobs. We present fiction as fact and our sources don’t actually exist. Names that represent actual people and places are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and do not in any way depict reality.
In other words, if you believe this crap you’re a real dumbass."
I will repeat myself, but IMHO intent matters. Satire is fine if the goal is to expose a problem in a playful way or to take a certain argument to an extreme to expose hypocrisy.
Where it doesn't work is to show how people are stupid, while feeding them wrong (but plausible from their POV) information. Yes, people are sometimes stupid, but if you want to showcase that, I think there is plenty of material to work with, you don't have to make things up.
It's like when police makes up a crime by entraping somebody, who wouldn't do the crime otherwise. It is not helping society in any positive way.
The Onion was wrong to publish that article. Now the poor people who are not able to recognize satire will be left with an impression that America's crumbling infrastructure is a bigger threat to American way of life than Al-Qaeda. This threatens the funding for important counter-terrorism activities of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
> He writes stuff that is so over the top that it's obvious satire. Like The Onion article about Congress demanding a retracting stadium style roof.
Wait. Are you trying to imply that Christopher Blair wrote that article for The Onion? I don't think that's right, is it?
If that wasn't your intention, why not link to an article actually by Christopher Blair and we can judge his writing on it's own merits, or lack thereof.
Lucky enough, thats not how our society works. You can be held responsible for doing something which harms others even if you do it 'so over the top'.
Even the onion has the responsibility. If they would create articles and people started to believe them, they would have to tell them that it is 'just' satire.
I don't even get it that this 'fuckedup' behaviour is justified by a mental model of yours which decides in your opinion what is 'over the top' and what not.
I love satire, dark humor etc. but i'm only expressing those things in an environment, which understands it AND which is not hurt by it.
And even when i'm very irritated that someone just not get it, IT still doesn't give me the right to laugh about them.
I think Americans should do the same thing as Germans did. They burned the old building so they had a reason to modernize it. It looks real snappy now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_dome
Humans, on the whole, aren't renown for their critical thinking.
We have had, what, maybe a few critical thinkers in the past couple thousand years. On a good day, maybe.
If anything, what typifies the human experience is that we are gullible, easily bored, lazy, impatient, selfish, greedy, stubborn, emotional, blunt, bossy, aggressive, critical, passive, fearful, close-minded, and disorganised.
Would it be fair to gaslight then blame the victim?
Would it be fair to remove someone's freedom of speech simply because you do not believe them and it is almost always impossible to prove such intent? Show your gaslighting damages to a court (i.e. fraud) and keep your easily abused, authoritarian censorship to yourself.
Wow... Top of HN - just disgusting. And whatever I say will be censored anyway just because I don't make new accounts. Dang, you should be ashamed of yourself. You're totally political, but just hiding behind the so-called site policy.
There's been a whole bunch of fake news and it all started way before 2016. I'd consider the whole premise of the Iraq War to be fake news, for example. The only reason they don't start there is that the same media now talking about fake news, helped to propagate them years earlier.
What made their fake news worse, is that it was propagated by supposedly trustworthy sources, in a serious tone. This guy seems like such a clown that you'd only "believe" him, if you're already predisposed to think these things anyway.
Or the Mexican-American war, of the incident in the Golf of Tonkin that was fake and lead to the Vietnam war... Fake news was acceptable as long as it came from the government
or mainstream media itself... it only became a problem when anybody could profit from it by shoving Google ads on the side...
Okay, I need to object here: You can't say that reported lies of the officials are the same as fiction made by media even if the outcome was the same.
Media not doing good enough job to scrutinize public figures and officials are fundamentally different from media that creates content that is intentionally misleading or fake. One is screw up and the other one is fraud.
Are you going to be equally mad to a friend of yours who hears that your SO is cheating on you and tells you what he heard(and the story turns out to be incorrect) and a friend who makes up a story about your SO cheating on you?
> You can't say that reported lies of the officials are the same as fiction made by media even if the outcome was the same.
The notion that the media had no clue the official claims were thin seems extremely dubious to me. They knew. Even the fact that they didn't make a big deal out of not getting UN approval, or dismissing any doubters as unpatriotic suggests otherwise. It was simply a case of not wanting to upset their owners who in many cases stood to make a profit off the war, not wanting to seem unpatriotic, wanting to maintain "access" to high-level officials and going to the same parties as many of the officials they are supposedly watching over, (a room full of reporters was laughing even as Bush was making "jokes" about not being able to find WMDs), so there was simply no incentive to report the truth.
You can see it to this day, it's not like oopps, the media has learned from Iraq. They've been as gushy over military adventurism in Libya, Syria etc.
Luckily, the debate around Yemen is changing somewhat, if very slowly.
A news article mis-representing a satirical[1] publication as "fake news". Expected better from BBC than going full meta-circular non-ironic, not-true news.
Particularly damning is the "The birth of the term" infobox, where authors complain >The term's meaning becomes fuzzy - it's also used to criticise opinion, spin and propaganda - while further adding to the fuzziness of term "fake news" by mis-using it for satirical website.
I think it is a moral responsibility of the satirist to make sure that, if people misunderstand the satire, the result is harmless to them and society at large. In particular, by not feeding the existing stereotypes.
It's like with any other prank. If it does a real harm, it is not funny anymore.
I’m not sure why we need another term, we already have lies, disinformation, propaganda, fraud. News is something true, if it’s intentionally not true, then I don’t see the point of using a new term with the word news in it.
I'm not even necessarily convinced the "non-fake" news is even good for people. The presentation of how content is all together like google news is possibly harmful to the human psych. As it's questionable how healthy it may be for people to digest content of every different emotion together, all in one sitting and it may even result in dehumanization subconsciously. I prefer to read my news from sources targeting my specific areas of interest and not see something negative when I'm subconsciously trying to be positive. I've also noticed how it's easy to nurture a defeatist mentality with negative news, the comments and just stumbling upon it without any intentions. News just feels like advertising, marketing and with some agenda at this point in my life. I think it should be irrational to assume the responsibility is on normal everyday people to be aware of all this. Fake news just seems like everyday "news" that is serving an agenda and is no different when it comes to negativity brought into society.
So is spreading intentional misinformation protected under free speech? What if for instance someone were to write an article about this gentleman something publicly shaming? That would be libel correct?
it's sad when you run a satire site and are labeled fake news simply because people want to believe it (despite several fat warnings on the site that it's all satire). if you follow Western comedians around these days many will point out that comedy has become more difficult than ever.
people are even less able to recognize fake-news which were put forward by their own governments. In the West there are many puppet masters too that pose as investigative journalists (e.g. @pwnallthethings) but are most certainly in the pocket of intelligence community.
Some noteworthy fake news to remember:
- Saddam's Bombs? We'll Find Them (2003): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/opinion/saddam-s-bombs-we-ll-find-them.html
- Why We Know Iraq Is Lying (2003): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/opinion/why-we-know-iraq-is-lying.html
31 comments
[ 111 ms ] story [ 1157 ms ] threadIt reminds me of two Czech cinematographers who made a "documentary" - Cesky sen - where the premise was that they made fake advertising for a new fake supermarket chain with things like large TVs for 5$ and so on, and then they "exposed the consumerism" of people "stupid enough to believe it" to come in droves for the mock opening.
I find this type of moralizing elitist and wrong. Garbage in, garbage out is true for humans too. If you deliberately feed people misinformation, then you have no right to complain (or feel morally superior) about bad decisions they make.
https://politics.theonion.com/congress-threatens-to-leave-d-...
From their About Us page:
"DISCLAIMER: America’s Last Line of Defense is a satirical publication that uses the imagination of liberals to expose the extreme bigotry and hate and subsequent blind gullibility that festers in right-wing nutjobs. We present fiction as fact and our sources don’t actually exist. Names that represent actual people and places are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and do not in any way depict reality.
In other words, if you believe this crap you’re a real dumbass."
Where it doesn't work is to show how people are stupid, while feeding them wrong (but plausible from their POV) information. Yes, people are sometimes stupid, but if you want to showcase that, I think there is plenty of material to work with, you don't have to make things up.
It's like when police makes up a crime by entraping somebody, who wouldn't do the crime otherwise. It is not helping society in any positive way.
The Onion was wrong to publish that article. Now the poor people who are not able to recognize satire will be left with an impression that America's crumbling infrastructure is a bigger threat to American way of life than Al-Qaeda. This threatens the funding for important counter-terrorism activities of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
Wait. Are you trying to imply that Christopher Blair wrote that article for The Onion? I don't think that's right, is it?
If that wasn't your intention, why not link to an article actually by Christopher Blair and we can judge his writing on it's own merits, or lack thereof.
Even the onion has the responsibility. If they would create articles and people started to believe them, they would have to tell them that it is 'just' satire.
I don't even get it that this 'fuckedup' behaviour is justified by a mental model of yours which decides in your opinion what is 'over the top' and what not.
I love satire, dark humor etc. but i'm only expressing those things in an environment, which understands it AND which is not hurt by it.
And even when i'm very irritated that someone just not get it, IT still doesn't give me the right to laugh about them.
Whom i to judge? As long as it doesn't affect me?
I think Americans should do the same thing as Germans did. They burned the old building so they had a reason to modernize it. It looks real snappy now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_dome
We have had, what, maybe a few critical thinkers in the past couple thousand years. On a good day, maybe.
If anything, what typifies the human experience is that we are gullible, easily bored, lazy, impatient, selfish, greedy, stubborn, emotional, blunt, bossy, aggressive, critical, passive, fearful, close-minded, and disorganised.
Would it be fair to gaslight then blame the victim?
What made their fake news worse, is that it was propagated by supposedly trustworthy sources, in a serious tone. This guy seems like such a clown that you'd only "believe" him, if you're already predisposed to think these things anyway.
Media not doing good enough job to scrutinize public figures and officials are fundamentally different from media that creates content that is intentionally misleading or fake. One is screw up and the other one is fraud.
Are you going to be equally mad to a friend of yours who hears that your SO is cheating on you and tells you what he heard(and the story turns out to be incorrect) and a friend who makes up a story about your SO cheating on you?
The notion that the media had no clue the official claims were thin seems extremely dubious to me. They knew. Even the fact that they didn't make a big deal out of not getting UN approval, or dismissing any doubters as unpatriotic suggests otherwise. It was simply a case of not wanting to upset their owners who in many cases stood to make a profit off the war, not wanting to seem unpatriotic, wanting to maintain "access" to high-level officials and going to the same parties as many of the officials they are supposedly watching over, (a room full of reporters was laughing even as Bush was making "jokes" about not being able to find WMDs), so there was simply no incentive to report the truth.
You can see it to this day, it's not like oopps, the media has learned from Iraq. They've been as gushy over military adventurism in Libya, Syria etc.
Luckily, the debate around Yemen is changing somewhat, if very slowly.
Particularly damning is the "The birth of the term" infobox, where authors complain >The term's meaning becomes fuzzy - it's also used to criticise opinion, spin and propaganda - while further adding to the fuzziness of term "fake news" by mis-using it for satirical website.
--
[1] https://realorsatire.com/thelastlineofdefense-org/ and other.
It's like with any other prank. If it does a real harm, it is not funny anymore.
people are even less able to recognize fake-news which were put forward by their own governments. In the West there are many puppet masters too that pose as investigative journalists (e.g. @pwnallthethings) but are most certainly in the pocket of intelligence community.
Some noteworthy fake news to remember: